Dang fool sewer construction folks

[gsabc]

I'm not looking forward to getting home today. The sewer line contractors are heading up the street, and will probably have dug in front of my house today. They fill in the holes overnight, but the dirt is a bit bumpy. I closed up the house to keep out the dust.

Yesterday, they had started up at 7:00 AM at the end of the street where they had last stopped their digging, about 60 yards from my house. A ginormous flatbed truck parked there, loaded with this hideously green pipe, a color best buried underground for certain. A backhoe pulled up alongside, and started lifting off bales (is that the right word?) of the pipe to bring to staging sites along the road. As I'm leaving the house around 7:15, the laden backhoe goes past toward the other end of the street, followed by an oil truck that had pulled out of the nearby side street. I pull out and head in the same direction, since I can't get through the other way.

The oil truck is stopped. Why? Because the backhoe was across the road completely, acting like he didn't know where to put down his load. He just sat there blocking the street entirely, oblivious to either the truck or me behind him. The oil truck's flashers go on, and the driver climbs out. He goes over to the backhoe driver. Apparently, this finally cued the backhoe driver to our presence. He puts down the load and straightens out the backhoe on the road so we can pass by. No telling how long we would have waited if the oil truck driver hadn't gone up to him.

I take my secondary route to the highway and hit the first cross-street. The street in FRONT of me is now blocked off with further sewer construction. Fortunately, a tertiary route leads almost immediately into the next town, or else who knows if I could have gotten to work. Woulda been nice if they'd planned their road closings a bit better. I was worried that we were on an island with all routes leading off closed for construction.